There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil.
The cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values.
Morality is a code of black and white. When and if men attempt a compromise, it is obvious which side will necessarily lose and which will necessarily profit.
Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man’s freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.
The political function of ‘the right of free speech’ is to protect dissenters and unpopular minorities from forcible suppression – not to guarantee them the support, advantages, and rewards of a popularity they have not gained.
The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.
And that night we knew that to hold the body of women in our arms in neither ugly nor shameful, but the one ecstasy granted to the race of men.
Place nothing above the verdict of your own mind.
There is no such thing as a lousy job – only lousy men who don’t care to do it.
She stood at the window, her arms spread wide, holding on to each side of the frame, it was as if she held a piece of the city.
When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.
He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss it.
There is fear hanging in the air of the sleeping halls, and the air of the streets. Fear walks through the city, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare speak.
He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another’s personality, marking vulnerable points.
I think. I am. I will.
I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all – that I was a man who made money.
Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.
Dagny, we can never lose the things we live for. We may have to change their form at times, if we’ve made an error, but the purpose remains the same and the forms are ours to make.
Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he’d taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.
A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards and judgment in order to appeal to the irrationality, stupidity, or dishonesty of others.